I am apparently fairly alone in thinking Simon should continue as President. He is very popular with rank and file members as President (though not as a potential leader apparently!).
The move to find someone else may be a blogging thing. In the leadership campaign, it was quite rare to find many bloggers for Ming. Bloggers mostly seemed to be Huhne or Hughes fanatics. Then it came as a bit of a surprise when Ming walked it. The ordinary non-blog members liked him in preference to the others.
The same sort of Blogosphere/Membership split may happen here. I have heard nothing but praise for Simon from ordinary members and supporters. He is regarded with something approaching hero-worship – regarded as a “real Liberal”.
If he doesn’t stand again, Paddy would, of course, be brilliant. I doubt whether he would want to do it, would he? Would he really want to be driving up from Somerset to chair potentially tedious meetings in Cowley Street? He’s been there, done that, got the tee-shirt and the wounds in his back from various stabbings by other party members.
But I have to say well done James Graham, on Quaequam Blog, who suggested David Rendel. I have voted “none of the above” (on the assumption that Simon won’t stand) in the poll because I would like to see David Rendel as President.
I should declare an interest. When they conduct the post-mortem on me, they will find “Liberal Democrat” engraved on the inside of my left ventricle. When they look a bit closer they will find “David Rendel fan” in a slightly smaller font underneath. The man is wonderful in that he really does work hard and operate at ground level – rolling his sleeves up and relating to people one-on-one with great humility and empathy.
He is a hugely intelligent man and doesn’t “miss any tricks”.
But most of all he has huge integrity and is a man of huge dignity, while he well understands and is able to operate in the world of daily politics. He does not get involved in scheming or plots and is a real loyal, relatively quietly spoken Liberal Democrat.
David Rendel would make a superb President.
Paul Walter blogs regularly at http://paulwalter.blogspot.com/
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4 Comments
In the leadership campaign, it was quite rare to find many bloggers for Ming. Bloggers mostly seemed to be Huhne or Hughes fanatics.
Um, it was? They did? Not the blogs I was reading. I trawled around as many Lib Dem blogs as I could during the leadership race (and doing so enthused me enough to rejoin after 4 years), and I’d say it was about 50/40/10 Ming/Chris/Simon. Finding a Hughes supporter in the blogs was rare, Chris got a lot due to emphasis on policy and good support from his official site and Ming got slightly more.
As, I think, Forceful and Moderate argued at the time, if there is any “split” in the party, it isn’t left/right, nor moderniser vs, its “liberals” (theorists and policy wonks” vs “democrats” (focus campaigners and “what’s asked for on the doorstep”).
I think she’s right, from what I’ve seen, and blogging tends to appeal to liberals more, we want to talk policy. Simon’s definately a democrat, he wants to win campaigns and promote local causes. Both have a place, and maybe the President’s job is to carry out that role, but he made promises when elected, and hasn’t kept them. I like him (or, at least, I like his persona), but I don’t respect him within a leadership role.
Good summation MatGB ! If anything it was the policy-wonk Huhne who was a little over-represented in blogosphere.
I voted Simon Hughes for leader and would vote for him as President again too in all likelihood.
One caveat is that the top of the party is far too male and of later ‘middle-age’ ! Greater diversity at the top is much needed.
I stand corrected. I am obviously not reading the right blogs. As an aside, our household (three LibDem members) was evenly split between all three candidates.
I was in Brighton for the day yesterday and mentioned to a number of friends who do not inhabit the blogosphere that there was a poll running which suggetsed people wanted Paddy to be President. I think my favourite and the best response was “why do they think he would want to come back and do that after he’s been running a country”!